Today Ellie and I went to the Seattle Aquarium with the local grandparents. Larry and Janet have wanted to take us for quite some time, but we've never been able to find a time that worked for all of us. Well, actually Jeff wasn't able to come since he's finishing up a book, but we'll bring him...

I thought Noveck said some marvelous things, but Bob Garfield framed the discussion somewhat inaccurately.
He said in the intro (that Noveck likely wouldn't have heard, recorded later) that patents have to be unique and nonobvious, but that's not quite right.
They have to be new, useful, legal, and nonobvious, which is somewhat different.
Garfield cited the Amazon 1-Click patent and a Smuckers crustless PBJ patent. Both of those probably meet all the tests, except the "new" test in which only examination of prior art and prior patents can reveal.
The 1-Click patent has been attacked for prior art, but as a patent, it's perfectly valid. I disagree with the entire notion of business-method patents, but as long as they exist, businesses must patent those methods or find competitors or patent trolls locking them out of their ability to use certain techniques. Noveck touched on this in noting that IBM and others have a huge interest in fostering patent examination because they are the victims of patent suits so often.
The Smuckers crustless sandwich patent is actually the kind of patent for which the system was developed, and Garfield confuses whimsy with usefulness. Smuckers developed a way to use a machine to create a "sealed" sandwich. In the 1700s, you could probably have developed an unhygienic version of that idea and gotten it patented.
(There may be lots of prior art and patents that could invalidate the Smuckers patent; I don't know.)
I see part of the great utility of open patent processes and PeerToPatent ideas as allowing folks with prior art to file it in a way that gives access to all others.

Beth's the US Deputy CTO on Open Government, charged in large part with enabling the reinvention of the US government. that's the Gov2.0 / eGovernment stuff. She just spoke on OnTheMedia, which is a really good podcast from WNYC of how well the media performs. Specifically, she talked abou...

This whole episode was fascinating, because it's so out of keeping with the usual run around with book authors about anything to do with anything.
VQN found something weird, did the thorough research one would expect if you were going to confront somebody with plagiarism, and then contacted you to obtain a response before publishing (if I get the time sequence right).
Your response was to take immediate responsibility for the omissions, explain why, and take steps along with your publisher to right the situation.
I can't recall the last time that happened.
I'm not familiar with the term write-through. Does that mean taking a source and reworking it to avoid citation? I can understand doing that with Wikipedia which is a secondary source.

As some of you may have seen, VQR rightly spotted that I failed to cite Wikipedia in some passages in Free. This is entirely my own screwup, and will be corrected in the ebook and digital forms before publication (and in the notes, which will be posted online at the same time the hardcover is re...

I suspect laziness. A writer found a couple good grafs from your story, pasted them in intending to credit them (at least to your name) to show what could happen, then an editor or other writer stitched it in.
It's otherwise too weird -- why not just make up the quote instead of using something easily googleable?

An article on the "Twitter burglary" (which, for the record, is a silly story that is likely little more than coincidence) lifts a passage from my WIRED feature "I Am Here" and attributes it as a quote to the victim of the burglary. I initially came across it in the free UK daily Metro, and assum...

"When we are with Ellie there is always this feeling of being on call, even if it's just to a small degree": This is such a fundamental part of parenting. Even when everything's perfect, you have to be ready to act. One of my goals in life is to be able to be ready to act, but also not as anxious about it. Still working on that after five years.

Grandma Susan came for a visit just two weeks after the Thompson grandparents headed home. Ellie has been enjoying all the extra attention. Jeff and Susan conspired to surprise me with an evening away. On Monday, with just a few minutes' notice, Jeff whisked me off to the Edgewater, a waterfront ...